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Co-op action roguelike 33 Immortals finally arrives in paradise
J
John Walker
As a result, 33 Immortals is a game you can play as a solo player, but you must find ways to work together with strangers if any of you are going to survive. Your best attacks are achieved when working in tandem, while buffs and boosts are essential for taking down the most powerful enemies. Running off on your own means likely death, but mucking in with a small group of others is the route to big wins.
The game has been in early access for just over a year, and will shortly add the third and final portion of the Divine Comedy-inspired setting, Paradiso, following on from previously well-played battles within Inferno and Purgatorio as it builds toward its release proper. So this seemed an excellent time to get in touch with developer Thunder Lotus to talk about their experience so far and the game’s approach to angels and the wrath of God.
A lot of games make grand claims about literary inspirations, but 33 Immortals has Dante’s 1321 narrative poem the Divine Comedy woven throughout its DNA. Not only is the medieval Italian work the basis for its afterlife setting, but even the number of players involved: The poem has 33 chapters. 33 Immortals’ creative director Stephan Logier explains that the poem “has heavily influenced the game’s development,” noting that “the places players explore, the bosses players face, and the characters players meet are all inspired by the Divine Comedy and recreated through our own creative perspective.” The studio’s goal, says Logier, “is to immerse players in the world of the Divine Comedy and in medieval Italy.”
Given that Dante’s work begins in Hell and then moves on to Purgatory, these make for obvious settings for antagonistic battles and fights to survive. But the final third, Paradiso, represents heaven—surely a place far less prone to almighty combat, right? “Things become quite strange and surprising in Paradiso,” says Logier. “Players will discover an out-of-this-world location. We used themes of Paradiso from the Divine Comedy to build this experience: space and planets, extremely powerful celestial beings…and created a moment when players could finally face the Wrath of God.”
Of course, this means we’ll be encountering angelic beings, and we aren’t talking about floaty-robed blondes strumming harps. Biblical angels and their medieval representations were often horrific creatures, and in a recent blog post Thunder Lotus had made the remarkable claim that its angels would be “Biblically accurate.” We had to know more, and art director Estefania Tastan went into detail. “As 33 Immortals uses Catholicism as a source of inspiration, we drew on how the Bible describes some angels, especially Seraphim and Cherubim…Revelation describes the angels as creatures with six pairs of wings, covered in eyes.” Crikey.
33 Immortals doesn’t arrive at its angelic designs from nowhere. Tastan tells us how they have resulted from a gradual process from earlier parts of the game. “The monster designs of 33 Immortals, from Inferno to Paradiso, have a throughline of metamorphosis from grotesque, bestial, etc., to fully realized angelic features, abstraction, and ego death. So that’s why some of the monsters in Paradiso are simple cubes, while some of the more intimidating mobs have become clusters of wings. Biblically accurate wings.”
In order to battle these creatures, players are obviously going to have to co-operate and coordinate more than ever before, the latter section of the game raising the challenge. If that’s the sort of feature that puts you off a game, 33 Immortals manages to mitigate that. As someone who finds co-op with strangers utterly terrifying and something to usually be avoided, I’ve found this game to be entirely different, a place where I can feel like a useful part of a team, only letting myself down when things go wrong. I wondered how Thunder Lotus had achieved this.
“The creative starting point was, how can we create a large-scale co-operative roguelike?" says Stephan Logier. "We wanted to add permadeath, so you have this die-and-retry classic roguelike loop, while also creating a large-scale co-operative experience. Mixing those words led us to design 33 Immortals as a massively multiplayer co-operative game in which your actions matter, but if you die the remaining players still have the means to prevail.” This, he says, leads “to those epic moments, especially during boss fights.”
Game designer Cem Ertekin chips in to say how the experience will change in Paradiso. “A lot of this will come from the way in which we’ve decided to increase combat difficulty,” he explains. “Monsters of Paradiso have ways of controlling players that those from earlier worlds simply didn’t. In some cases, if you get caught you will need another ally to come save you.” This, it’s hoped, will cause players to work more closely, recognizing when others are in greater need.
The new chapter will also be introducing more puzzle elements, which Ertekin says will provide a different challenge than players have experienced so far. “They will require a bit of collective thinking to solve on the fly, while you’re also fighting for your life.”
Early access has proved a positive experience for Thunder Lotus. “We developed the game while listening to what our players thought,” says Logier. “We learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t in our game thanks to our amazing player community, and we’ve tried to continuously release updates that improve our game and surprise our players. So far, early access has been great and exciting.”
Speaking of surprise, I wondered if the developers had also experienced any twists or turns they hadn’t seen coming. It seems the biggest factor was the game’s popularity. “The players’ massive positive reception…was the biggest surprise,” says Logier, “because 33 Immortals is quite an unusual experience, and, as developers, we were eager to know what players thought about it!”
The team has made progress much more quickly than they expected. “I didn’t expect to add that much content in the little time we had,” Logier notes, “with features like monster armor and improved relics.” Along with this, the addition of dynamic difficulty—a feature long requested by players to improve scaling when facing bosses with smaller numbers—and the achieved balance has taken the developer aback. “This,” Logier concludes, “is all thanks to our wonderful community and their precious feedback, so I want to thank them all for that.”
33 Immortals: The Paradiso Update is out now on Epic Games Store. You can get an excellent overview of the first region and starting weapons in the demo.